350-mile commute will end for public welfare secretary

HARRISBURG — Gov. Tom Corbett's controversial public welfare secretary is leaving the administration, confirming Tuesday a report that appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Monday.

Comment

By The Philadelphia Inquirer

poconorecord.com

By The Philadelphia Inquirer

Posted Feb. 6, 2013 at 12:01 AM

By The Philadelphia Inquirer

Posted Feb. 6, 2013 at 12:01 AM

» Social News

HARRISBURG — Gov. Tom Corbett's controversial public welfare secretary is leaving the administration, confirming Tuesday a report that appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Monday.

Gary Alexander, who oversees a department charged with helping 2.1 million elderly, poor and disabled Pennsylvanians, will be leaving his $149,000 post by the end of the month.

Alexander says he's leaving to explore unspecified private-sector opportunities and to spend more time with his family in Rhode Island.

That Rhode Island family was part of the controversy around Alexander. Last December, the PA Independant news service reported on Alexander's weekly 350-mile round-trip commutes from Rhode Island in a state-owned car. He frequently spent four days or fewer in Harrisburg each week, and over the course of a year, the trips cost more than $4,700 in taxpayer funds.

Alexander defended his use of the car by saying he paid part of the cost out of his own pocket, though that was not clear from expense reports obtained via an open records request.

During his two-year tenure, Alexander has frequently become a lightning rod for public anger over the Corbett administration's cuts to social welfare services. In January 2012, Alexander announced the department was instituting an asset test — making the amount of food stamps that people receive contingent on the assets they possess.

It was an unexpected move that bucked national trends — favored by both Democrats and Republicans, to eliminate asset tests altogether — since they are viewed as punitive toward elderly people saving for their burials, poor people trying to save enough to get out of poverty, and working- and middle-class people who lost their jobs in the recession and would have to liquidate assets to feed their families.

Alexander's department also faced sharp questions about children being dropped from Pennsylvania's Medicaid rolls. Between August 2011 and January of last year, about 130,000 people — including 89,000 children — were dropped from Medicaid rolls, leading some advocacy groups to cry foul. The number was so high that the Obama administration stepped in, seeking detailed information to determine whether anyone had been wrongfully struck from the rolls.

Separate from his policy decisions, the secretary also came under fire last year for hiring Robert W. Patterson, the editor of an ultraconservative faith-based journal, as a top aide. In his writings, Patterson had condemned birth control, working women, and some of the programs assisting the poor that the department was responsible for administering.